Executive Recruiting: Culture, Convergence And COVID-19
Executive Summary
COVID-19 has created an “always accessible” online work environment conducive to executive recruiting, although some candidates are hesitant to change jobs during pandemic-related uncertainty. Corporate culture and an accelerating digital convergence continue to drive hiring decisions, in addition to US immigration policy and a renewed emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion.
The creation of an agile business, defined by McKinsey as a business model with “self-steering, high-performing teams supported by a stable backbone,” gained traction in the biopharma industry prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The need to change rapidly in response to new market developments and disruption, such as an expanding array of digital tools for R&D and customer engagement, or the entrance of gene and cell therapies, pushed many company leaders to rethink outdated processes and perspectives.
In 2020, COVID-19 made agility a biopharma executive prerequisite, which left some executives – particularly in operations, finance or supply chain functions – in the lurch, according to Nick Stephens, executive chairman at the RSA Group, an executive recruiting firm focused on the biopharma and life sciences industries. “We’ve seen examples of CFOs who served during really good times and positive waves, but now the cracks are starting to show,” said Stephens. In operational roles, new positions have opened where existing executives were either unprepared or unwilling to change fast enough. “Agility used to be measured in half years or years,” said Stephens. “It’s now measured in weeks.”
Operational execution in manufacturing and the supply chain has become mission critical during COVID-19, with companies having to find brand new ways to scale up products and services. “There is more of a focus on Six-Sigma type constant improvement and marginal gains” in supply chain functions, noted Stephens, which has become less relevant, because trying to maximize shareholder returns in one small part of the business can actually cause mistakes that harm a company’s overall strategy.
RSA did not notice a slowdown in C-suite recruitment until the middle of June 2020, in part due to ongoing projects that had begun prior to the pandemic, according to Stephens. “Then we had a big pause, maybe six weeks, where nobody seemed to make any decisions in the second half of July and early August.”
Video Kills The Telephone Interview
After COVID-19 set in, most of the industry made the switch to Zoom or Microsoft Teams and carried on interviewing job candidates. “People are using the same technologies in recruiting now that they use to make decisions across their regions and businesses,” said Stephens. Interestingly, however, some companies “tended not to believe that a candidate would accept a job without being physically in place,” he said. “But that’s not true.”
In the case of a chief scientific officer recently recruited by a biopharma company with $20bn in annual revenues, interviews were conducted via video, which worked well, Stephens said. But then the hiring company held off on making a final decision until the candidate could visit a facility in person. “My response was, ‘You have 41 facilities around the world, do you want [the candidate] to go to all of them, just some of them, or one in particular?’” The company ultimately decided to extend an offer without an in-person visit, said Stephens, and “the only thing they didn’t get right away was a start date, because [the candidate] didn’t know when they could physically attend in that country.”
Julie Carretero, recently hired as chief people officer at Evelo Biosciences, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based clinical stage biotech firm developing monoclonal microbials, told In Vivo that video was likely here to stay, and could even replace telephone calls. “I think it’s easier to connect with someone on video,” said Carretero, whose previous experience includes a chief human resources (HR) officer role at FXI, a polyurethane foam manufacturer, and six years working in HR at Novartis, first as associate director and then as director, HR business partner. “I do wonder how many phone screenings I’ve been on either end of, that haven’t worked out in moving the process forward, that may have been different had there been a visual connection, that personal connection,” said Carretero.
Julie Carretero, chief people officer, Evelo Biosciences
Asked about her own experience interviewing with Evelo Biosciences during COVID-19, in comparison with past recruiting experiences, Carretero said the interviews were very similar, aside from conversations about the impact of the pandemic on company culture and productivity. But the format – video instead of in-person – was different. “The process may have taken slightly longer, due to that change. Probably not just from the Evelo side, but from my side as well. It takes a bit longer to build those relationships in this new environment.”
Even so, years of working remotely have made Carretero a strong proponent of video over telephone calls. “Prior to the pandemic, a lot of interviews would happen over the phone. I think it's just more challenging to make a connection without having that visual, the ability to see someone [and] connect with them in that way. I do think that video might be here to stay, and it might replace phone conversations.” Carretero spent her first week on the job in Evelo’s Cambridge office, but is now working remotely, “along with the rest of our employees that aren’t in the lab.”
More Accessible, But Risk-Averse
Remote work, which does not require commuting and often provides more flexibility to workers, has led to a surge in online activities. For example, LinkedIn Learning, an educational video service featuring industry executives teaching business skills, saw viewing rates clime to 7.7 million hours in April, a three-fold increase in the amount of time users spent on the site compared with February, according to a report in HR Dive. For executive recruiters, the level of engagement with potential candidates has increased as well.
“Right now, a lot of people, as a result of COVID-19, have developed a habit of engaging [with recruiters] where they wouldn’t previously,” said Stephens. “That’s because they’re working from home and they are curious about novel opportunities. I think the level of engagement has gone up, and that should be good for the entire ecosystem.” However, some of that engagement may be hedging bets, which is okay, according to Stephens, as long as candidates are honest with potential new employers. “People might see [executive recruiting] as an insurance policy in case things go bad [in a current role]. That’s entirely understandable and it’s human nature,” said Stephens. But candidates should come clean about their motives, before getting too far down in the process. “Don’t say you’re interested unless you mean it,” advised Stephens.
Accessing the talent pool has gotten easier during the COVID-19 pandemic, agreed Carretero. “By and large, people are more accessible working remotely, so making those connections is a little bit easier. But what I’ve also found is that people might be a little bit more risk averse to making a move, given the uncertainty of everything that’s happening in the world,” she said.
Hunting Grounds For New Skills
Technology and retail sectors continue to be prime hunting grounds for executives sourced outside of the biopharma industry. Challenging industry norms has led to disruption in retail, changing how consumers make purchasing decisions, including how they buy products and where they buy them. “In biotech, we’re really trying to transform and disrupt,” said Carretero. “If you look at someone who has been in the retail sector for the past 10 years, they can probably talk about how different it is right now, in ways that were never anticipated.” The retail sector has provided a strong talent pool and some transferrable skills and competencies to biopharma, added Carretero. Recruits from the retail sector can “bring a lot of perspective in challenging norms that we thought would never change.”
The biopharma industry’s ongoing effort to digitize everything has increased the need for tech talent, including data and artificial intelligence experts. Those business needs put recruiters in direct competition with the likes of Amazon, Google and other tech heavyweights. As a result, biopharma salary and reward models were changing, said Stephens, to meet higher compensation expectations at the large tech firms. “The industry has to match salaries it would never have dreamed of seeing in what was previously thought of as the IT department,” he said. “Digitization, including processes, communication, in-bound information-gathering, interpretation and actions after that – you get those people from many other industries, but not from the life sciences sector, because it’s five to 15 years behind much of the rest of the world,” said Stephens.
Asked about challenges in bringing executives from the tech or retail sectors into biopharma companies, Carretero put her HR bona fides on display and confessed her industry bias. “Why would anyone not want to be in life sciences from another sector? I have found a certain uniqueness in biotech, especially, as it relates to believing passionately in what we do and why we do it. That can be a challenge for some people.”
Workforce Diversity And US Immigration Policy
Evelo Biosciences is focused on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and antidiscrimination efforts, which was a must, said Carretero. Regarding executive recruiting, “we are pushing ourselves and our partners to find a diverse candidate pool. It’s clear that we can’t rely on others to do that for us and find a solution.” Asked to rate the biopharma industry at large on executive diversity and inclusion, Carretero said, “We can definitely do better.”
The best organizations were diverse, said Stephens. “Diversity is really about a difference in mental attitudes at the table, and a combination of attitude and maturity in terms of how you then turn that into decision-making,” he said. “Color or race or sexuality or religion, those are only surrogate markers. But they do tell you that a person may have had different life experiences that bring value to the table.”
Nick Stephens, executive chairman, RSA Group
Transcontinental diversity in the US workplace became more difficult in June, when the Trump administration issued an executive order suspending several kinds of work visas, including H-1b visas, which are used to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty occupations, such as research labs. The order has effectively decreased the availability of talent in the US. (Also see "Digitizing Molecules To Create Novel Antibiotics" - In Vivo, 21 Sep, 2020.)
For executive directors or vice presidents in specialized roles, for example, American companies may be unwilling to jump through the hoops required to secure visas for employees, said Stephens. One candidate “whose next step is clearly a global head of regulatory at a top tier pharma … she will not be able to get a job in the US without considerable effort on the part of the employing company,” he said, citing a recent conversation with a job candidate. “And frankly, there is enough of a talent pool in the US, probably, to mean that she will be excluded.” Any time there are limits placed on specialized work visas, it shrinks the talent pool, adds Carretero. “It will be more expensive and more cumbersome” to recruit foreign workers, and “the process will be less clear for candidates,” she said.
Pro Tips For Future Executives
Being able to see and act on the big picture is a highly prized attribute in biopharma executives, according to Stephens and Carretero. Going a step beyond functional or subject matter expertise to make connections and establish communications between different business areas is vital to an effective corporate strategy, and an effective executive.
To get there, aspiring executives should take advantage of opportunities to work in different parts of the business. “When organizations provide their associates with opportunities to move throughout the organization laterally, to get exposure to different parts of the organization, that can really foster executive skills,” said Carretero. “While they may land in one place with that functional expertise, they bring a set of skills and a broader understanding to the table. I think that's really important at the executive level.”
Opportunities for work across different business areas may not always be apparent, but employees should seek out those roles, said Stephens. Some organizations do promote movement throughout the organization, but many others do not. “In large part, your ability to succeed is primarily based on the box that people put you in,” he said. Budding executives “need to develop a broader commercial viewpoint so they can understand the real priorities of peers in other functional areas and contextualize that internal organization.” Aspiring executives are often high performers, and their bosses or teams may not always want to let them leave for other company experiences. “You have to actively manage that yourself,” advised Stephens. “Make yourself your own business.”